


Deprival

by aperture_living



Category: OFF (Game)
Genre: Blood, Death, Drabble, Drama, Gen, Gore, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 05:44:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/807962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aperture_living/pseuds/aperture_living
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Resolve was a necessity, not a luxury. </p>
<p>(A loosely based sequel to "The Expressions We Choose". )</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deprival

Every step was a shallow echo, a onetime bounce off the walls before it struck back to his ears with grim consent. He didn't want to be here but he had to check, had to see before he left and let things go to their natural and infallible order. This now, these steps and their descent down, was compulsion: a desire to know, a _need_ to have a memento, something no one else could understand. He was used to it. Hell, he almost looked forward to it, in some unspoken way, but this particular one had the slightest of tarnishes on it.

It was an honor, but for himself or her, he wasn't exactly sure.

At the top of the stairs, Zacharie could catch the whispers of blood on the air and each one down made it more and more impossible to ignore. While this wasn't the first time he had the scent, this was the first time he had paused, waited, felt it dig in under his skin with sharpened barbs and fishhooks. This time it was personal, even more personal than Valarie had been; this was a patient that a doctor knew, a surgeon working on a friend. Resolve was a necessity, not a luxury. 

When the bottom step was crossed over, he stared across shadows and piles of sugar, white heaps that were brown in decorative splashes of drawn blood. He could see the slumped form slapped and forgotten against a wall from where he stood, darkness crawling over it with greedy, wanton fingers. He could see the way her hands lay open, muscles at flat as the nonexistent heart rate, could see the way her legs were splayed wide and disjointed, see the way her head was bowed, hair hiding the worst of it. Or at least, hiding the worst of it from here; once he drew closer, he knew his luck would run out. 

_Oh, Batter, what work you do, hm? You destroy, and I try to preserve it after the damage is done. Let's see how good of a job you did today, shall we?_

Shoes ground over errant grains of sugar that had spread away from their neat piles, but from the violence or their own tiny nature, he exactly wasn't sure. It didn't matter, not really; once things were disturbed, they could never be undisturbed, not without impossible pipedreams. Still, it sounded like sand, like glass, like sharpened hate underfoot, and when he was standing over her, he knew.

_You outdid yourself this time, Batter._

The angle of her jaw was inhuman, the savage gap in her teeth that he could see where her mouth hung open, the blood down her face, and her eye, the ocular cavity, the shattered mess of her nose-- Had the Batter known he was close to the end, and the excitement gotten the better of him? The rage? The deluded mission? The fact that it was all within his grasp and almost over?

Zacharie looked away with a sigh, putting the scalpel in his backpack with a begrudging slowness. He breathed in the Toad King, savored at least one thing that hadn't changed, one thing he had managed to save, and sighed as he headed towards the stairs. There would be no preservation today, no mask to make, no reminder to keep with him; she would simply be an intangible memory that would rust and decay without the proper treatments. 

Not that he had long to let time wear on the warm recollections, not if the Batter did as he intended.

Perhaps it was best this way. With what was on the wind, he had a feeling that he wouldn't have had the time to make her into a true mask, anyway.


End file.
